EVERYTHING GOOD GOES

A VIDEO COLLABORATION with LIAM GILLICK_THE VINCENT VAN GOGH AWARD

In 2008, Liam Gillick, a selected finalist for The Vincent Award chose Stephen Blaise to direct and the team at FLY to produce the video he would enter in competition for the award.

The work was presented by Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, in a large, custom-built black box room.

Liam Gillick’s video ‘Everything Good Goes’ is set in New York in 2008. An artist is preparing and editing a series of texts and recordings of lectures that he presented at unitednationsplaza in Berlin. As he reworks the contents of the lectures, he is at the same time attempting to construct a 3D computer model of the film set of ‘Tout va Bien’ by Jean-Luc-Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin. Throughout the piece, the artists face is never seen. Only his hands working at the computer are shown as his voice is heard over the phone leaving a 12minute voicemail message. The process is filmed and co-directed by Stephen Blaise.

‘Tout va Bien’ is set in France in 1972, four years after the revolutionary events of 1968. The political right once again has French society firmly in its grasp. A strike breaks out in a sausage factory, and the workers occupy the factory space. The camera slides past the factory offices, capturing the simultaneous nature of the events, the discussions and the polemics. Similarly, Stephen Blaise’s use of camera movement in ‘Everything Good Goes’ mimics that of Goddards. He further references the film, by capturing Liam Gillick’s computer monitor as it mimics the camera movement inside the Salami factory.

A typical element of Liam Gillick’s art is his skepticism regarding completely autonomous and solitary creation of (visual) art; his approach is closely related to other cultural disciplines, such as contemporary music, film, design and architecture. Collaborations with other people are a crucial element of his practice, in which he assumes the roles of visual artist, musician, designer, writer and theoretician. ‘Everything Good Goes’ could be viewed as a way of bringing these parallel activities, the recent past and the near future, into contact with one another.